Wimmera review: Mark Brandi's evocation of crime and masculinity in the outback

By Sue Turnbull

6 October 2017 — 11:45am

FICTIONWimmeraMARK BRANDIHachette, $29.99

Mark Brandi's first crime novel, Wimmera, has already won the British Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger. Such recognition is good news for Australian authors still inclined to set their crime fiction in an anonymous elsewhere in order to find a global readership.

But these days a vividly conceived Australian rural location may well be a drawcard. Far from the urban mean streets, the diverse and frequently hazardous Australian landscape comes into its own as an evocative scene of murder. The success of Jane Harper's The Dry being a recent case in point.

Brandi grew up in an Italian family in a rural Victorian town way out west. This is mirrored in the experience of one of his central, exquisitely drawn characters, 11-year-old Fabrizio "Fab" Moressi.

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Wimmera, by Mark Brandi.

But Wimmera is, of course, a fiction and the first 100 pages belong to Ben, Fab's best friend, whom we meet on the day their neighbour, 14-year-old Daisy Wolfe, commits suicide by hanging herself from a Hills Hoist.

Ghoulishly fascinated but puzzled why anyone would do such a thing, Ben is happy to avoid the funeral since this means he can stay home alone. Ben is to all intents a perfectly "normal" boy, preoccupied with The A-Team on TV, a stunning example of dysfunctional masculinity if ever there was one.

Fab is also pretty "normal", apart from his troubled relationship with a violent Italian father who has a blurred concept of parenting. Fab's mother, on the other hand, is all sweetness and light, the quintessential Italian mama offering spaghetti as consolation while carefully concealing her own dark bruises. Without ever discussing this, Ben and Fab both know this is not how things should be. Just one of their many unspoken understandings.

Wimmera is as much about the perplexing experience of growing up as it is about the crime that creeps up on us from page one. Here, two different boys out yabbying in a dam find a wheelie bin with its lid nailed shut. What secret lies within will take some time to emerge.

Brandi is not afraid to go slowly. Indeed the first half of Wimmera feels a lot like childhood, that endless era when time appears to stand still. Nor does he feel compelled to fill in all the gaps. When the crime does occur, the details are largely left to our imaginations. What makes Wimmera so effective, and original, is the pacing and the restraint.

Part two belongs to Fab, now 23 and winding his own slow way to nowhere, working in a supermarket after an unfortunate experience working in an abattoir. None of these details is wasted. Brandi quietly sets up the moves that will lead to an ending that is all the more haunting for the ways in which it joins all the dots.

Meanwhile, life in regional Victoria has changed. Fab's new best friend is Afriki, a Sudanese refugee who belongs to a throng of tall men dressed in white polyester suits who can be seen on Sundays, escorting their wives dressed in their bright greens, blues and gold "like no one has ever seen".

It's details like these that elevate Wimmera to a different level of achievement. This is not only a story about growing up, or the revelation of a horrendous and all too familiar crime, but a stunning evocation of what it might feel like to grow up male somewhere in the country of the past.